Inconvenient facts

The truth about guns and gun control is somewhat different from the narrative that has been spewing from the likes of President Obama, Sen. Blumenthal and Sen. Murphy. Here’s the data.

To summarize:

Firearm-related homicides declined 39%, from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011.
Nonfatal firearm crimes declined 69%, from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 victimizations in 2011.

Often, I receive earnest letters to the editor stating as fact that America is in some kind of wild orgy of violence, then going on to blame the trend on whatever the writer has settled on. It might be violent video games, movies and TV shows; or the guns themselves; or drugs. The data tell a different story. Here’s a report on this contradiction: gun crime is down, but Americans believe it’s up.

This is especially compelling to me, as one who bought into the “superpredator” warnings of more than a decade ago. I guess I just wasn’t remembering some of the things I was reading back in the 1980s, when I created a local-history feature for the small paper I was working for at the time, using archives dating back about 100 years. Frequently, back in the 1890s, editors and readers went on about how young people of the time were dangerous, lazy, out of control, stupid or all of the above. I guess every generation thinks it’s doing an awful job of raising young people.

I have to admit it: Look at the time frames of violent crime and you’ll find the baby boomers right in the thick of the worst of it. Maybe there was one generation that didn’t do such a great job of setting its progeny on the right course. Sadly, that generation is also known as The Greatest Generation. But it could be more simple than that. America had a very large number and a very large percentage of young people during the baby-boom era, and young people commit more crimes than old people. We baby boomers are in our 50s and 60s now, and our criminal impulses have been suppressed by the ravages of age. And the statistics bear this out. What they don’t bear out is the notion that we’re in the middle of a violent outbreak that requires major reforms and restrictions, right now.